o Find the RecycleRight mobile app at the Apple iTunes store or Google Play. (The app image is the big blue recycling cart.) Don’t have a smartphone or tablet? Access the garbage and recycling collection calendar and A-Z Recycling wizards on your home computer. Go to the city of Vancouver’s website at www.cityofvancouver.us/publicworks/page/recycling-right-made-easy; Waste Connections of Washington at www.wcnorthwest.com; or Clark County’s website at www.clark.wa.gov/recycle. For more information, contact the city’s Solid Waste Services at 360-619-4120.
o If you encounter a problem with an item in the wizard, send a note to solidwaste@cityofvancouver.us.
o Plastic film and plastic grocery/shopping bags: This includes the plastic wrap around rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, newspaper bags, cereal box liners and shopping bags. At the West Van Material Recovery Facility, which processes 20 tons of recyclables an hour, the plastic film and bags clog the fast-moving machinery. This requires a daily equipment shutdown while workers cut away the plastic by hand with box knives. Plastic film and bags should be taken to grocery stores that collect them.
o Glass: Should be placed in a separate container next to recycling carts. If broken glass gets mixed with paper, the paper fiber isn’t as marketable to recycling companies because it wears out the equipment.
o Christmas lights: The strands get tangled in the equipment. If they’re still working, donate them. If not, take them to one of several places that recycles them, such as Earth Friendly Recycling in Vancouver. (Use the A-Z Recycling tool or app for a full list.)
Plastic take-out clamshells? No.
Glass bottles and jars? No.
Plastic grocery bags and the plastic wrapper around toilet paper rolls? Absolutely not.
The lesson: Just because an item is stamped with three arrows doesn’t mean it can go in the big blue recycling carts throughout Clark County.
So many rules, you groan. But wait: There’s an app that makes it simple to determine what goes in the trash, the recycling cart or a specific facility.
Created for the city of Vancouver, Clark County and Waste Connections of Washington, the RecycleRight app brings recycling and trash pickup schedules and reminders, recycling information and contacts to your computer, smartphone or tablet. With the app’s Recycling A-Z search wizard, you can enter an item and find a variety of options for reusing and recycling it.
If the item needs special handling, such as computers, American flags, large appliances, paint or hazardous waste, the app will provide disposal instructions with a list of drop-off sites, addresses, phone numbers and maps.
“We find that when people have that information handy and don’t have to call someone … people are going to be able to follow through,” Vancouver Public Works spokeswoman Loretta Callahan said.
The app, which made its debut in December, may be especially useful over the next month, when workers inspect the contents of about 20,000 recycling carts on about 25 routes throughout Clark County to look for unacceptable items — called “residue.” Nothing will be taken out of the carts during the quick inspections, but workers might lift items on top to see what’s underneath, according to a Clark County press release.
The inspections, which began April 13, are part of a five-year Recycling Done Right program aimed at improving the quality of recyclables. Funded by a state Department of Ecology grant, the $50,000 program is a partnership between Clark County Environmental Services, the city of Vancouver, other towns in Clark County and Waste Connections, the local solid waste and recycling company.
Residents, who will be contacted by phone prior to the inspection, won’t be penalized if inappropriate items are found. Instead, the inspection teams, wearing safety vests and driving Clark County vehicles, will leave cards on the carts encouraging good recycling habits and directing them to www.RecyclingDoneRight.com to learn more and enter to win prizes.
Every year through 2019, inspections will be conducted on about 25 routes until all the roughly 125 routes have been spot-checked. Clark County, which has more than 111,000 single-family recycling customers, recycles 35,000 tons of material each year.
To measure the Recycling Done Right program’s effectiveness, the amounts and types of materials found in the carts will be compared before and after the outreach effort. In 2012, a similar program found contamination dropped significantly after customers received educational material, according to county statistics. The results:
• 83 percent of carts that contained plastic bags on the first visit didn’t have them on the second.
• 96 percent of carts that contained glass bottles on the first visit didn’t have them on the second.
• 78 percent of carts that contained other various contaminants on the first visit were “clean” on the second.
The current recycling collection system is in its sixth year. In 2009, Clark County switched to recycling carts from the three-bin curbside system in place since 1992. Since then, the amount of residue in Clark County’s urban household recycling carts has climbed from about 6 percent to 17 percent, according to a study in June, according to Rich McConaghy, the city of Vancouver’s environmental resources manager.
“We continually want to improve and reduce that number,” he said last week.
What’s acceptable to put in a recycling bin in Portland or Seattle may not be allowed here. That’s because different communities target different recycling markets, McConaghy said. Waste Connections, which owns the West Van Material Recovery Facility, sells cardboard to U.S. companies, aluminum to a bottle factory in Tennessee, paper to China and glass to a company in Oregon to be made into new bottles, said Derek Ranta, Waste Connections’ district manager.
So what’s the big deal if there’s garbage in the recycling sent to the processing plant?
For starters, “That’s a long trip to the landfill if you’re putting stuff in the cart that should go in the garbage,” McConaghy said. “Why not just put it in the garbage directly?”
Also, good quality recyclables help reduce recycling rates, which the city of Vancouver hasn’t raised in three years. The value of the recyclables that are sold is paid to Waste Connections to offset rates.
“The better the recycling stream, the more citizens benefit from lower processing costs and higher revenues,” Don Benton, Clark County Environmental Services director, said in a press release.
o Plastic film and plastic grocery/shopping bags: This includes the plastic wrap around rolls of paper towels and toilet paper, newspaper bags, cereal box liners and shopping bags. At the West Van Material Recovery Facility, which processes 20 tons of recyclables an hour, the plastic film and bags clog the fast-moving machinery. This requires a daily equipment shutdown while workers cut away the plastic by hand with box knives. Plastic film and bags should be taken to grocery stores that collect them.
o Glass: Should be placed in a separate container next to recycling carts. If broken glass gets mixed with paper, the paper fiber isn't as marketable to recycling companies because it wears out the equipment.
o Christmas lights: The strands get tangled in the equipment. If they're still working, donate them. If not, take them to one of several places that recycles them, such as Earth Friendly Recycling in Vancouver. (Use the A-Z Recycling tool or app for a full list.)
Lastly, there’s a demand for recycling commodities, which are used as feedstock for recycled products, from paper to aluminum pop cans. If quality feedstock isn’t available, the manufacturers will go back to virgin resources, such as forests, McConaghy said.
For more information about Recycling Done Right, call Clark County Environmental Services at 360-397-2121, ext. 4352.
